I took a creative writing class today and here is a 250 word story I wrote for it.

Though my hunger has faded as my stomach is compressed by my ever ripening I can not resist the bite size morsel slowly moving by with just the right combination of wiggle and purple to compel me to eat. A quick flick of my tail, a last adjustment of my fins, and the morsel is in me.

My mouth closes and I savor the anticipated crunch of the exoskeleton and sweet shrimpy flavor of the zooplanktor. But,there is no sweet crunch and flood of flavor. There is a hard cold taste of steel and then a driving prick of pain as the creature pierces my jaw and jerks my body to align with the direction it is traveling. I recoil with all the force in my body to free myself from the impossible power of this thing towing me away from my path toward the nirvana of spawning relief.

Instead, my body is inexorably pulled through the surface, into the air, and onto a deck. I flop frantically trying to free myself and return to my journey, my spawn exploding from me, running out on the deck as the water pressure holding me together is lost.

The blade slicing through my gills feels more like relief than death as I suffocate. My dying eyes take in the fisherman, my maker, my killer, as he removes his hook from my jaw. I can not comprehend that this end was the reason for my creation.

Yikes, Salty. Good writing but wouldn't PETA like to get a hold of it? They would prefer to see the salmon pierced on the jaws of a sea lion, not hooked by a lowly man.

I always smile when I remember what "Jim" said on "Taxi": "If the whole world really is out to get you, then 'paranoid' is just good thinking'".

I often think of how herring catch hell from all sides and it amazes me how brutal nature is. Herring apparently exist merely to fuel the planet's life engine. Yet nature is the highest standard of what is ethical. The individual counts for zero - the survival of the species is the only imperative.

Those of us who work in nature understand its brutality. PETA people do not, and to a lesser extent neither do the city dwellers who must choose which side to sympathize with. I read a good article on the wolves vs. ranchers battles in the lower west. A rare even-minded environmentalist understood that the ranchers who work outdoors have a real connection with nature that the city dwellers do not. The city folk think it is beautiful and fascinating, but the rural people have a more fundamental understanding, as they actually participate in nature's confrontations.

Off on a tangent, now I will provide a link to an epic video I saw last week of thousands of honey bees in a futile attempt to defend their hive from 30 Japanese hornets. It is set to classical music and is compelling. I showed it to my 16 year old daughter to further her education. BUT, I was also able to follow up with a video where a honeybee colony that had lived near those hornets for much longer had evolved a strategy to defeat the hornets. So our human emotions were salved. It is hard to comprehend that this epic battle is carried out with no emotion on the part of the combatants. They are only following their DNA script.

I thought about the implications of my story. But, as brutal as hooking a fish to eat or sell is, it is way more intimate, than strangling it in a gillnet, squishing it in a seine, or hooking it and then releasing it for "sport". Not that I condemn any of those, just contrasting the experience. I believe there is some connection between this relationship and why hook and line fishermen are often among the leading fisheries conservation advocates. In my life I am confident that I have done more to create and conserve fisheries life than I have ever harvested or facilitated the harvest of. Sometimes I think there is a cosmic connection between my conservation and my fisheries success.

Thanks for engaging and thinking. That is the purpose of this story, to make you think about a possible fish's perspective.

I just posted the link to Tele's story here and re-read this submission. Made me think about all we do to sustain and enhance salmon lives in Alaska. The strongest protections for wild salmon in the world and the most carefully controlled ocean ranching program in the world. That the quality of salmon lives we conserve by protecting and enhancing wild salmon runs and the creation of ocean ranched salmon who spend most of their lives freely roaming the ocean must be so much better than the lives of those fish confined to pens in salmon farms.